“I do not believe,” Hope replied, “that that will be possible now.”
“But there are still six pillars.”
“Pillars? An interesting choice of words. Yes. Six remain. But there should have been thirteen. The three that were sent to stop the Consort were what could—in an emergency—be spared.”
“I can’t see them, either.”
“You will,” he said softly. “Approach the words, Chosen. Do what you must do.”
Kaylin had no problem doing what she had to do—when she understood what that was. In general, when orders were passed down the chain of command, the person handing them down knew the desired results, even when some poor private actually had to do the work.
But whining, while it bled away some of the tension, didn’t actually get much done. It was acceptable if you were doing the work. As a way of avoiding work, it was definitely third class, although on bad days, it was all she had to offer.
Today was a different kind of bad. She might have some idea of what needed to be done if she was closer to the cluster, but closer was its own challenge. Here, no matter how she walked, distance between that cluster and Kaylin seemed to be a constant. She didn’t get any closer. She could run—and did—to no effect whatsoever.
There was no point in expending energy running if it made no difference. She needed to think. She had approached words like this before. She’d approached them in a panic. She’d approached them when the cost of failure could be measured in lives, one of them her own.
But approaching the words themselves hadn’t been the problem; figuring out what constituted success had. She closed her eyes—which, as usual, changed nothing—and tried to think.
“I don’t understand metaphor,” she told Hope.
He chuckled. “You don’t understand the mechanics of breath, either; you manage to breathe without that understanding. You know what will happen if you can’t.”
“This isn’t like breathing.”
“Isn’t it? You are here, where none of your companions—no matter how versed they are in the Arcane—can join you. You could find Lord Nightshade using the tools at hand, without a complete understanding of how those tools function. You have only a base idea of how your daggers are forged, but you know how to use them. This is not different.” He drifted, for the first time, ahead of Kaylin; she could see the spread, the reach, of his wings.
Those wings were the color—the exact color—of the marks on her arms.
But her skin was the color of fire. Looking down, she realized that the fire had accompanied her.
“It is better to say you have not left it,” Hope told her gently. “Although here, its voice is muted, its desire banked. There is nothing here to burn. There is no cold, no ice to melt, no iron to forge; it is, for the fire, a world without conflict.”
“There’s almost nothing here, Hope.”
“Exactly.”
“Why can the fire be here?”
“You must ask.”
“Or you could tell me.”
“No, Kaylin, I can’t. I could try—but I do not have the language to explain it.”
The fire didn’t, either. The communication between element and summoner had never been particularly subtle. She opened her eyes again. The words were at the same distance, unless she was looking at them the wrong way. At that distance, they had no answers to give her.
So she looked, instead, to her feet.
“I think I see the problem.”
Hope said nothing, because he realized she was thinking out loud. She often avoided words when there were other people present, afraid in some fashion that they were the wrong words—either too offensive or too stupid. Here, there was no one but Hope who could judge. Hope, she thought, and some hint of Spike.
The words appeared to exist on an entirely separate platform. Kaylin had been doing the effective equivalent of running into an invisible wall. Had there been some impact—any impact—she would have realized it sooner. She lifted a hand, an arm, and reached out with the flat of her palm.
She felt a very gentle resistance. Pulling her arm back and making a fist, she drove the fist forward. The resistance was the same; it was gentle, almost unnoticeable.
“Why does everything have to be so complicated?”
